The prehistory and history of South Africa span nearly the entire known existence of human beings and their ancestors—some three million years or more—and include the wandering of small bands of hominins through the savanna, the inception of herding and farming as ways of life, and the construction of large urban centres. Through this diversity of human experience, several trends can be identified: technological and economic change, shifting systems of belief, and, in the earlier phases of humanity, the interplay between physical evolution and learned behaviour, or culture. Over much of this time frame, South Africa’s past is also that of a far wider area, and only in the last few centuries has this southernmost country of Africa had a history of its own. This article focuses on the country of South Africa. For information about the country in its regional context, see Southern Africa.

Prehistory

The earliest creatures that can be identified as ancestors of modern humans are classified as australopithecines (literally “southern apes”). The first specimen of these hominins to be found (in 1924) was the skull of a child from a quarry site at Taung in what is now the North-West province. Subsequently more australopithecine fossils were discovered in limestone caves farther northeast at Sterkfontein, Swartkrans, and Kromdraai (collectively designated a World Heritage site in 1999), where they had originally been deposited by predators and scavengers.

South Africa’s prehistory has been divided into a series of phases based on broad patterns of technology. The primary distinction is between a reliance on chipped and flaked stone implements (the Stone Age) and the ability to work iron (the Iron Age). Spanning a large proportion of human history, the Stone Age in Southern Africa is further divided into the Early Stone Age, or Paleolithic Period (about 2,500,000–150,000 years ago), the Middle Stone Age, or Mesolithic Period (about 150,000–30,000 years ago), and the Late Stone Age, or Neolithic Period (about 30,000–2,000 years ago). The simple stone tools found with australopithecine fossil bones fall into the earliest part of the Early Stone Age.

The Early Stone Age

Most Early Stone Age sites in South Africa can probably be connected with the hominin species known as Homo erectus. Simply modified stones, hand axes, scraping tools, and other bifacial artifacts had a wide variety of purposes, including butchering animal carcasses, scraping hides, and digging for plant foods. Most South African archaeological sites from this period are the remains of open camps, often by the sides of rivers and lakes, although some are rock shelters, such as Montagu Cave in the Cape region.

Change occurred slowly in the Early Stone Age; for more than a million years and over a wide geographic area, only slight differences existed in the forms of stone tools. The slow alterations in hominins’ physical appearance that took place over the same time period, however, have allowed physical anthropologists to recognize new species in the genus Homo. An archaic form of H. sapiens appeared about 500,000 years ago; important specimens belonging to this physical type have been found at Hopefield in Western Cape province and at the Cave of Hearths in Mpumalanga province.

The Middle Stone Age

The long episode of cultural and physical evolution gave way to a period of more rapid change about 200,000 years ago. Hand axes and large bifacial stone tools were replaced by stone flakes and blades that were fashioned into scrapers, spear points, and parts for hafted, composite implements. This technological stage, now known as the Middle Stone Age, is represented by numerous sites in South Africa.

Open camps and rock overhangs were used for shelter. Day-to-day debris has survived to provide some evidence of early ways of life, although plant foods have rarely been preserved. Middle Stone Age bands hunted medium-sized and large prey, including antelope and zebra, although they tended to avoid the largest and most dangerous animals, such as the elephant and the rhinoceros. They also ate seabirds and marine mammals that could be found along the shore and sometimes collected tortoises and ostrich eggs in large quantities. The rich archaeological deposits of Klasies River Mouth (see Klasies), on the Cape coast west of Port Elizabeth, have preserved the first known instance of shellfish being used as a food source.

Klasies River Mouth has also provided important evidence for the emergence of anatomically modern humans. Some of the human skeletons from the lower levels of this site, possibly 115,000 years old, are decidedly modern in form. Fossils of comparable age have been excavated at Border Cave, in the mountainous region between KwaZulu-Natal province and Swaziland.

The Late Stone Age

Basic toolmaking techniques began to undergo additional change about 40,000 years ago. Small finely worked stone implements known as microliths became more common, while the heavier scrapers and points of the Middle Stone Age appeared less frequently. Archaeologists refer to this technological stage as the Late Stone Age. The numerous collections of stone tools from South African archaeological sites show a great degree of variation through time and across the subcontinent.

The remains of plant foods have been well preserved at such sites as Melkhoutboom Cave, De Hangen, and Diepkloof in the Cape region. Animals were trapped and hunted with spears and arrows on which were mounted well-crafted stone blades. Bands moved with the seasons as they followed game into higher lands in the spring and early summer months, when plant foods could also be found. When available, rock overhangs became shelters; otherwise, windbreaks were built. Shellfish, crayfish, seals, and seabirds were also important sources of food, as were fish caught on lines, with spears, in traps, and possibly with nets.

Dating from this period are numerous engravings on rock surfaces, mostly on the interior plateau, and paintings on the walls of rock shelters in the mountainous regions, such as the Drakensberg and Cederberg ranges. The images were made over a period of at least 25,000 years. Although scholars originally saw the South African rock art as the work of exotic foreigners such as Minoans or Phoenicians or as the product of primitive minds, they now believe that the paintings were closely associated with the work of medicine men, shamans who were involved in the well-being of the band and often worked in a state of trance. Specific representations include depictions of trance dances, metaphors for trance such as death and flight, rainmaking, and control of the movement of antelope herds.

Pastoralism and early agriculture

New ways of living came to South Africa about 2,000 years ago. Until that time, human communities had survived by gathering plant foods and by hunting, trapping, and scavenging for meat, but with the introduction of agriculture—arguably the single most important event in world history—people began to make use of domesticated animals and plants. This in turn led to a slow but steady rise in population and to more-complex political and religious organizations, among other things. Crops could be grown and cattle, sheep, and goats herded near permanent villages and towns in the east, where rainfall was adequate. In the more arid west, domestic livestock were kept by nomadic pastoralists, who moved over wide territories with their flocks and herds.

Although the origin of nomadic pastoralism in South Africa is still obscure, linguistic evidence points to northern Botswana as a probable source. The linguistic evidence is supported by finds of sheep bones and pottery from Bambata Cave in southwestern Zimbabwe that have been dated to about 150 BC. Whether new communities moved into South Africa with their flocks and herds or whether established hunter-gatherer bands took up completely new ways of living remains unclear. In any case, the results of archaeological excavations have shown that sheep were being herded fairly extensively by the first few centuries AD in eastern and western parts of the Cape and probably in the northern Cape as well.

While traces of ancient herding camps tend to be extremely rare, one of the best-preserved finds is at Kasteelberg, on the southwest coast near St. Helena Bay. Pastoralists there kept sheep, hunted seals and other wild animals, and gathered shellfish, repeatedly returning to the same site for some 1,500 years. Such communities were directly ancestral to the Khoekhoe (also spelled Khoikhoi) herders who encountered European settlers at the Cape of Good Hope in the mid-17th century.

The archaeological traces of farmers in the eastern regions of South Africa are more substantial. The earliest sites date to the 3rd century AD, although farming was probably already well established by this time. Scatters of potsherds with distinctive incised decoration mark early village locations in Mpumalanga and parts of KwaZulu-Natal.

The Iron Age

Because the first farmers had knowledge of ironworking, their archaeological sites are characterized as Iron Age (c.AD 200). New groups of people arriving in South Africa at that time had strong connections to East Africa. They were directly ancestral to the Bantu-speaking peoples who form the majority of South Africa’s population today.

Iron Age sites

Early Iron Age farmers grew crops, cutting back the vegetation with iron hoes and axes, and herded cattle and sheep. They heavily supplemented farming by gathering wild plant foods, engaging in some hunting, and collecting shellfish if they lived near enough to the coast. Where conditions for agriculture were favourable, such as in the Tugela River valley in the east, villages grew to house several hundred people. Some trade existed between groups of farmers—evidence for specialization in salt making has been found in the northeast—and with the hunter-gatherer bands that continued to occupy most parts of South Africa. Finely made life-size ceramic heads found near the city of Lydenburg (now Mashishing) in eastern South Africa and dated to the 7th century AD are all that remains of the people who once inhabited this region.

Early Iron Age villages were built in low-lying areas, such as river valleys and the coastal plain, where forests and savannas facilitated shifting (slash-and-burn) agriculture. From the 11th century, however, in the period conventionally known as the Late Iron Age, farming communities began to settle the higher-lying grasslands. It has not been established whether these new communities were inhabited by invaders or reflected the diffusion of new knowledge to existing populations. In many areas the new communities started making different forms of pottery and built villages out of stone. Most probably these and other changes in patterns of behaviour reflect the increasing importance of cattle in economic life.

First urban centres

Other changes came in the north. Arab traders established small settlements on the Tanzanian and Mozambican coasts in their search for ivory, animal skins, and other exotica. The trade beads they offered in return began to reach villages in the interior, the first indications that the more complex economic and social structures associated with long-distance trade were developing. The arid Limpopo River valley, avoided by the earliest farmers, developed as a trade route. Sites such as Pont Drift (c. 800–1100) and Schroda (dated to the 9th century) show that their occupants were wealthy in both livestock and trade beads.

The Limpopo River valley was also the setting in which Bambandyanalo and Mapungubwe developed as South Africa’s first urban centres during the 11th century. Starting as a large village like Schroda and Pont Drift, Mapungubwe rapidly developed into a town of approximately 10,000 people. Differences in status were clearly demarcated: the elite lived and were buried at the top of the stark sandstone hill at the town’s centre, while the rest of the population lived in the valley below. Hilltop graves contained lavish burial goods, including a carefully crafted gold rhinoceros and evidence of specialized crafts such as bone and ivory working. Bambandyanalo and Mapungubwe were abandoned after the 13th century after having been occupied for several hundred years. The trade connections that the Limpopo valley offered were taken over by Great Zimbabwe, farther to the north.

Europeans in South Africa

The first Portuguese ships rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1488, their occupants intent on gaining a share of the lucrative Arab trade with the East. Over the following century, numerous vessels made their way around the South African coast, but the only direct African contacts came with the bands of shipwreck survivors who either set up camp in the hope of rescue or tried to make their way northward to Portuguese settlements in present-day Mozambique. Both the British and the Dutch challenged the Portuguese control of the Cape sea route from the early 17th century. The British founded a short-lived settlement at Table Bay in 1620, and in 1652 the Dutch East India Company set up a small garrison under the slopes of Table Mountain for provisioning their fleets.

Settlement of the Cape Colony

The Dutch East India Company, always mindful of unnecessary expense, did not intend to establish more than a minimal presence at the southernmost part of Africa. Because farming beyond the shores of Table Bay proved necessary, however, nine men were released from their contracts with the company and granted land along the Liesbeek River in 1657. The company made it clear that the Khoekhoe were not to be enslaved, so, beginning in that same year, slaves arrived in the Cape from West and East Africa, India, and the Malay Peninsula. By the end of the century, the imprint of Dutch colonialism in South Africa was clear, with settlers, aided by increasing numbers of slaves, growing wheat, tending vineyards, and grazing their sheep and cattle from the Cape peninsula to the Hottentots Holland Mountains some 30 miles (50 km) away. A 1707 census of the Dutch at the Cape listed 1,779 settlers owning 1,107 slaves.

In the initial years of Dutch settlement at the Cape, pastoralists had readily traded with the Dutch. However, as the garrison’s demand for cattle and sheep continued to increase, the Khoekhoe became more wary. The Dutch offered tobacco, alcohol, and trinkets for livestock. Numerous conflicts followed, and, beginning in 1713, many Khoekhoe communities were ravaged by smallpox. At the same time, colonial pastoralists—the Boers, also called trekboers—began to move inland beyond the Hottentots Holland Mountains with their own herds. The Khoekhoe chiefdoms were largely decimated by the end of the 18th century, their people either dead or reduced to conditions close to serfdom on colonial farms. The San—small bands of hunter-gatherers—fared no better. Pushed back into marginal areas, they were forced to live by cattle raiding, justifying in colonial eyes their systematic eradication. The men were slaughtered, and the women and children were taken into servitude.

The trekboers constantly sought new land, and they and their families spread northeast as well as north, into the grasslands that long had been occupied by African farmers. For many generations these farmers had lived in settlements concentrated along the low ridges that break the monotony of the interior plateau. While it is difficult to make population estimates, it is thought that some of the larger villages could have housed several hundred people. Cattle were held in elaborately built stone enclosures, the ruins of which survive today across a large part of Free State province and in the higher areas north of the Vaal River. Extensive exchange networks brought iron for hoes and spears from specialized manufacturing centres in the Mpumalanga Lowveld and the deep river gorges of KwaZulu-Natal.

Thus, by the closing decades of the 18th century, South Africa had fallen into two broad regions: west and east. Colonial settlement dominated the west, including the winter rainfall region around the Cape of Good Hope, the coastal hinterland northward toward the present-day border with Namibia, and the dry lands of the interior. Trekboers took increasingly more land from the Khoekhoe and from remnant hunter-gatherer communities, who were killed, were forced into marginal areas, or became labourers tied to the farms of their new overlords. Indigenous farmers controlled both the coastal and valley lowlands and the Highveld of the interior in the east, where summer rainfall and good grazing made mixed farming economies possible.

Cape Town was developing into South Africa’s major urban centre, although it took many years for it to equal the size that Mapungubwe had attained some five centuries earlier. The initial grid of streets had been expanded and linked the company’s garden to the new fortress that overlooked Table Bay. Houses featuring flat roofs, ornate pediments, and symmetrical facades sheltered officials, merchants, and visitors en route between Europe and the East. A governor and council administered the town and colony. While the economy was in principle directed by the interests of the Dutch East India Company, in practice corruption and illegal trading were dominant forces. Both the town and the colony existed in large part because of slaves, who by now outnumbered their owners.

Growth of the colonial economy

From 1770 to 1870 the region became more fully integrated into the world capitalist economy. Trekboers, who were weakly controlled by the Dutch East India Company, advanced across the semidesert Karoo of the central Cape and collided with African agricultural peoples along a line running from the lower Vaal and middle Orange river valleys to the sea around the Gamtoos River (west of modern Port Elizabeth). These agriculture-based African societies proved resilient but, even at their height in the 1860s, were unable to unite completely enough to expel the Europeans.

The decisive moment for the colony occurred in 1806 when Britain seized Cape Colony during the Napoleonic Wars. Initially the colony’s importance was related to its function as a strategic base to protect Britain’s developing empire in India. In the next few years, however, it also served as a market, a source of raw materials, and an outlet for emigration from Britain.

African societies after the 1760s were increasingly affected by ivory and slave traders operating from Delagoa Bay, Inhambane, and the lower Zambezi River in the northeast as well as by traders and raiders based in the Cape to the south. In response to these invasions, the farming communities created a number of sister states different in structure, scale, and military capacity from anything that had existed before. The Pedi and Swazi in the eastern Highveld, the Zulu south of the Pongola River, the Sotho to the east of the Caledon River valley, the Gaza along the lower Limpopo, and the Ndebele in present-day southwestern Zimbabwe proved to be the most successful.

The areas of the western Cape with the longest history of settlement by Europeans had evolved an agricultural economy based on wheat farming and viticulture, worked by imported slave labour. Slaves were treated harshly, and punishments for slaves who assaulted Europeans were brutal—one of the most heinous being death by impalement. Escaped slaves formed groups called Maroons—small self-sufficient communities—or fled into the interior. Because slave birth rates were low and settler numbers were increasing, in the 1780s the Dutch stepped up the enserfment of surviving Khoe (also spelled Khoi; pejoratively called Hottentots) to help run their farms. Those Khoe who could escape Dutch subjugation joined Xhosa groups in a major counteroffensive against colonialism in 1799–1801, and there were slave rebellions in the outskirts of Cape Town in 1808 and 1825.

The Dutch refusal to grant citizenship and land rights to the “Coloured” offspring of unions between Europeans and Khoe or slaves produced an aggrieved class of people, known as Basters (or Bastards), who were Christian, spoke Dutch, and had an excellent knowledge of horses and firearms. Many fled north toward and over the Orange River in search of land and trading opportunities. After merging with independent Khoe groups, such as the Kora, they formed commando states under warlords, three of the more successful being the Bloem, Kok, and Barends families, who were persuaded by missionaries in the early 19th century to change their name to Griqua. By the 1790s they were trading with and raiding local African communities such as the Rolong, Tlhaping, Hurutshe, and Ngwaketse. For self-defense some of these African communities formed larger groupings who competed against each other in their quest to control trade routes going south to the Cape and east to present-day Mozambique.

The Portuguese and also some British, French, Americans, and Arabs traded beads, brass, cloth, alcohol, and firearms along the southeast coast in return for ivory, slaves, cattle, gold, wax, and skins. During the late 18th century, large volumes of ivory were exported annually from Delagoa Bay, and slaves were taken from the Komati and Usutu (a major tributary of the Maputo) river regions and sent to the Mascarene Islands in the Indian Ocean and to Brazil to work on sugarcane and coffee plantations. By 1800 trade routes linked Delagoa Bay and coastal trade routes with the central interior.

European trade precipitated structural transformation within societies inland of Delagoa Bay. Warlords reorganized military institutions to hunt elephants and slaves. Profits from this trade enhanced the warlords’ ability to disperse patronage, attract followers, and raise military potential and, in turn, their capacity to dominate land, people, and cattle. Near the bay, Tembe and Maputo were already powerful states by the 1790s. To the west of the coastal lowlands emerged the Maroteng of Thulare, the Dlamini of Ndvungunye, and the Hlubi of Bhungane. Between the Pongola and Tugela rivers evolved the Mthethwa of Dingiswayo south of Lake St. Lucia, the Ndwandwe of Zwide, the Qwabe of Phakatwayo, the Chunu of Macingwane, and, south of the Tugela, the Cele and Thuli. Several groups—for example, the Mthethwa, Ndwandwe, and Qwabe—later merged with the Zulu. These groups competed to dominate trade and became more militarized the closer they were to the Portuguese base.

The Cape Colony had spawned the subcolonies of Natal, the Orange Free State, and the Transvaal by the 1860s. European settlement advanced to the edges of the Kalahari region in the west, the Drakensberg and Natal coast in the east, and the tsetse-fly- and mosquito-ridden Lowveld along the Limpopo River valley in the northeast. Armed clashes erupted over land and cattle, such as those between the Boers and various Xhosa groups in the southeast beginning in the 1780s, and Africans lost most of their land and were henceforth forced to work for the settlers. The population of European settlers increased from some 20,000 in the 1780s to about 300,000 in the late 1860s. Although it is difficult to accurately estimate the African population, it probably numbered somewhere between two and four million.

Increased European presence (c. 1810–35)

British occupation of the Cape

When Great Britain went to war with France in 1793, both countries tried to capture the Cape so as to control the important sea route to the East. The British occupied the Cape in 1795, ending the Dutch East India Company’s role in the region. Although the British relinquished the colony to the Dutch in the Treaty of Amiens (1802), they reannexed it in 1806 after the start of the Napoleonic Wars. The Cape became a vital base for Britain prior to the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, and the Cape’s economy was meshed with that of Britain. To protect the developing economy there, Cape wines were given preferential access to the British market until the mid-1820s. Merino sheep were introduced, and intensive sheep farming was initiated in order to supply wool to British textile mills.

The infrastructure of the colony began to change: English replaced Dutch as the language of administration; the British pound sterling replaced the Dutch rix-dollar; and newspaper publishing began in Cape Town in 1824. After Britain began appointing colonial governors, an advisory council for the governor was established in 1825, which was upgraded to a legislative council in 1834 with a few “unofficial” settler representatives. A virtual freehold system of landownership gradually replaced the existing Dutch tenant system, under which European colonists had paid a small annual fee to the government but had not acquired land ownership.

A large group of British settlers arrived in 1820; this, together with a high European birth rate and wasteful land usage, produced an acute land shortage, which was alleviated only when the British acquired more land through massive military intervention against Africans on the eastern frontier. Until the 1840s the British vision of the colony did not include African citizens (referred to pejoratively by the British as “Kaffirs”), so, as Africans lost their land, they were expelled across the Great Fish River, the unilaterally proclaimed eastern border of the colony.

The first step in this process included attacks in 1811–12 by the British army on the Xhosa groups, the Gqunukhwebe and Ndlambe. An attack by the Rharhabe-Xhosa on Graham’s Town (Grahamstown) in 1819 provided the pretext for the annexation of more African territory, to the Keiskamma River. Various Rharhabe-Xhosa groups were driven from their lands throughout the early 1830s. They counterattacked in December 1834, and Governor Benjamin D’Urban ordered a major invasion the following year, during which thousands of Rharhabe-Xhosa died. The British crossed the Great Kei River and ravaged territory of the Gcaleka-Xhosa as well; the Gcaleka chief, Hintsa, invited to hold discussions with British military officials, was held hostage and died trying to escape. The British colonial secretary, Lord Glenelg, who disapproved of D’Urban’s policy, halted the seizure of all African land east of the Great Kei. D’Urban’s initial attempt to rule conquered Africans with European magistrates and soldiers was overturned by Glenelg; instead, for a time, Africans east of the Keiskamma retained their autonomy and dealt with the colony through diplomatic agents.

The British had chronic difficulties procuring enough labour to build towns and develop new farms. Indeed, though Britain abolished its slave trade in 1807 and pressured other countries to do the same, the British in Southern Africa continued to import some slaves into the Cape after that date, but in numbers insufficient to alleviate the labour problem. A ban in 1809 on Africans crossing into the Cape aggravated the labour shortage, and so the British, like the Dutch before them, made the Khoe serfs through the Caledon (1809) and Cradock (1812 ) codes.

Anglo-Boer commandos provided another source of African labour by illegally capturing San women and children (many of the men were killed) as well as Africans from across the eastern frontier. Griqua raiding states led by Andries Waterboer, Adam Kok, and Barend Barends captured more Africans from among people such as the Hurutshe, Rolong, and Kwena. Other people, such as those known as the Mantatees, were forced to become farmworkers, mainly in the eastern Cape. European farmers also raided for labour north of the Orange River.

Cape authorities overhauled their policy in 1828 in order to facilitate labour distribution and to align the region with the growing imperial antislavery ethos. Ordinance 49 permitted black labourers from east of the Keiskamma to go into the colony for work if they possessed the proper contracts and passes, which were issued by soldiers and missionaries. This was the beginning of the pass laws that would become so notorious in the 20th century. Ordinance 50 briefly ended the restrictions placed on the Khoe, including removing the requirement for passes, and allowed them to choose their employers, own land, and move more freely. Because an insufficient labour force still existed, Anglo-Boer armies (supported by Khoe, Tembu, Gcaleka, and Mpondo auxiliaries) acquired their own workers by attacking the Ngwane east of the Great Kei at Mbolompo in August 1828. The formal abolition of slavery took place in 1834–38, and control of African labourers became stricter through the Masters and Servants Ordinance (1841), which imposed criminal penalties for breach of contract and desertion of the workplace and increased the legal powers of settler employers.

The Delagoa Bay slave trade

While events were unfolding at the Cape, the slave trade at Delagoa Bay had been expanding since about 1810 in response to demands for labour from plantations in Brazil and on the Mascarene Islands. During the late 1820s, slave exports from the Delagoa Bay area reached several thousand a year, in advance of what proved to be an ineffective attempt to abolish the Brazilian trade in 1830. After a dip in the early 1830s, the Bay slave trade peaked in the late 1840s.

The impact of the slave trade was increasing destabilization of hinterland societies as populations were forcibly removed. The Gaza, Ngoni, and other groups became surrogate slavers and joined the Portuguese soldiers in inland raiding. Along the Limpopo and Vaal river networks, Delagoa Bay slavers competed with Griqua slavers in supplying the Cape. After slavers burned crops and famines became common, many groups—including the Ngwane, Ndebele, and some Hlubi—fled westward into the Highveld mountains during the 1810s and ’20s. The Kololo, on the other hand, moved east out of Transorangia, where they ran into Bay slavers, and migrated west into Botswana. In 1826 they were attacked by an alliance of Ngwaketse and European mercenaries and ended up in Zambia in the 1850s exporting slaves themselves to the Arabs and Portuguese.

Emergence of the eastern states

Four main defensive African state clusters had emerged in eastern South Africa by the 1820s: the Pedi (led by Sekwati) in the Steelpoort valley, the Ngwane (led by Sobhuza) in the eastern Transvaal, the Mokoteli (led by Moshoeshoe) in the Caledon River region, and the Zulu (led by Shaka) south of the Swart-Mfolozi River. The Pedi received refugees from the Limpopo and coastal plains, and the Mokoteli absorbed eastern Transorangian refugees, which enabled them to defeat the Griqua and Korana raiders by the mid-1830s. By 1825 Shaka had welded the Chunu, Mthethwa, Qwabe, Mkhize, Cele, and other groups into a large militarized state with fortified settlements called amakhanda. Zulu amabutho (age sets or regiments) defended against raiders, provided protection for refugees, and, apparently, began to trade in ivory and slaves themselves.

From 1824 the Zulu began to clash with Cape colonists who came to Port Natal (renamed Durban in 1835) and organized mercenary armies. These groups were comparable to the Portuguese prazero armies along the Zambezi and to the warlord state set up by the Portuguese trader João Albasini in the eastern Transvaal in the 1840s, but they operated on a smaller scale. During the 1820s European raiders joined Zulu amabutho in attacking areas north of the Swart-Mfolozi River and south of the Mzimkulu River, where in the mid-1820s French ships exported slaves. Francis Farewell’s raiders, in alliance with Zulu groups, seized women and children in the same area in 1828.

Conflicts split the Zulu elite into rival factions and led to Shaka’s assassination in 1828. Shaka’s half brother Dingane became the Zulu leader, but his succession was accompanied by civil wars and by increasing interference in the Delagoa Bay trading alliances. By the mid-1830s a coalition of Cape merchants had begun planning for the formal colonization of Natal, with its superb agricultural soils and temperate climate. The British left the less-desirable malaria-ridden Delagoa Bay region to the Portuguese, who traded slaves out of Lourenço Marques (now Maputo, Mozam.) for another half century.

The expansion of European colonialism (c. 1835–70)

The Great Trek

A few Boer settlers had moved north of the Orange River before 1834, but after that the number increased significantly, a migration later known as the Great Trek. The common view that this was a bid to escape the policies of the British—i.e., the freeing of slaves—is difficult to sustain, as most of the former slave owners did not migrate (most trekkers came from the poorer east Cape), and the earlier labour shortage had been alleviated by 1835. Instead, the trek was more of an explosive culmination of a long sequence of colonial labour raids, land seizures, punitive commando raids, and commercial expansions. Europeans, who possessed technologically advanced weaponry, also had instructive examples of how small groups of raiders in Natal and Transorangia could cause disruption over large areas. Thus, the trekkers should not be seen as backward feudalists escaping the modern world, as some historians have maintained, but as energized people extending their frontier.

Several thousand Boers migrated with their families, livestock, retainers, wagons, and firearms into a region already destabilized and partially depopulated by Griqua and coastal raiders. They did encounter some Africans (such as the Ndebele), who in the early 1830s had moved from the southeastern to the western Transvaal. The Boers and their Rolong, Taung, and Griqua allies, however, crushed the Ndebele during 1837, taking their land and many cattle, women, and children. The remaining Ndebele fled north, where they resettled in southern Zimbabwe.

The trekkers had penetrated much of the Transvaal by the early 1840s. A grouping of commando states emerged based at Potchefstroom, Pretoria, and, from 1845, Ohrigstad-Lydenburg in the eastern Transvaal. Andries Hendrik Potgieter, Andries Pretorius, Jan Mocke, and others competed for followers, attacked weaker African chiefdoms, hunted elephants and slaves, and forged trading links with the Portuguese. Other Boers turned east into Natal and allied themselves with the resident British settlers. Farms developed slowly and, as had been the case in the Cape prior to the 1830s, depended on forced labour. Until the 1860s the Pedi and Swazi in the east and even the Kwena and Hurutshe in the west were strong enough to avoid being conscripted as labour and thus limited the labour supply.

The British in Natal

The appearance of thousands of British settlers in Natal in the 1840s and ’50s meant that for the first time Africans and European settlers lived together—however uneasily—on the same land. The Boers began to carve out farms in Natal as they had done along the eastern frontier, but further slave and cattle raids on the Bhaca south of the Mzimkulu provided the pretext for British annexation of Natal in 1843. Theophilus Shepstone received an appointment in 1845 as a diplomatic agent (later secretary for native affairs), and his position served as a prototype for later native commissioners. The Harding Commission (1852) set aside reserves for Africans, and missionaries and pliant chiefs were brought in to persuade Africans to work. After 1849 Africans became subject to a hut tax intended to raise revenue and drive them into labour. Roads were built, using forced labour, and Africans were obliged to pay rent on state land and European farms. To meet these burdens some African cultivators grew surplus crops to sell to the growing towns of Pietermaritzburg and Durban.

The British were reluctant, though, to annex the Transorangian interior, where no strategic interests existed. Boer trade links with Delagoa Bay posed little threat because Portugal was virtually a client state of Britain. To the Boers fell the tasks of eroding African resistance and developing the land, although the policy never received clear enunciation or much financial backing. Britain halfheartedly attempted to protect some of its African client states, such as that of the Griqua and the Sotho state led by Moshoeshoe. However, after further fighting with the Rharhabe-Xhosa on the eastern frontier in 1846, Governor Colonel Harry Smith finally annexed, over the next two years, not only the region between the Great Fish and the Great Kei rivers (establishing British Kaffraria) but also a large area between the Orange and Vaal rivers, thus establishing the Orange River Sovereignty. These moves provoked further warfare in 1851–53 with the Xhosa (joined once more by many Khoe), with a few British politicians ineffectively trying to influence events.

A striking feature of this period was the capacity of the Sotho people to fend off military conquest by the British and Boers. After defeating and absorbing the rival Tlokwa in 1853–54, Moshoeshoe became the most powerful African leader south of the Vaal-Pongolo rivers. His soldiers utilized firearms and, in the cold Highveld, horses—which proved to be the keys to political and military survival there.

Attempts at Boer consolidation

Faced with these unprofitable conflicts, the British temporarily withdrew from the southern African interior, and the Transvaal and Orange Free State Boers gained independence through the Sand River and Bloemfontein conventions (1852 and 1854, respectively). Both Boer groups wrote constitutions and established Volksraade (parliaments), although their attempts at unification failed. For more than a decade, civil wars and the struggle with the environment hampered consolidation among the Boers. Nevertheless, the Orange Free State’s economy grew rapidly, and by the 1860s the Boers were exporting significant amounts of wool via Cape ports.

The Cape economy

Capitalist infrastructure came earlier to the Cape than to the Boer regions because of its older colonial history and its seacoast links to the British Empire. Banks, insurance companies, and limited-liability companies arose in the 1840s and ’50s, and a class of prosperous colonial shopkeepers, financiers, traders, and farmers emerged as Cape Town grew to more than 30,000 people in the 1850s. Port Elizabeth, established in 1820, also became an important trading centre and harbour. The British government granted the Cape settlers what was termed “representative government” in March 1853 (the Legislative Assembly had elected members, with an executive appointed from London) and “responsible government” in 1872 (the assembly appointed the executive). Franchise qualifications were relatively low, and even some Africans could vote, although their small number had no political impact. These nominal rights were reduced later in the century and abolished outright in 1936.

Between 1811 and 1858 colonial aggression deprived Africans of most of their land between the Sundays and Great Kei rivers and produced poverty and despair. From the mid-1850s British magistrates held political power in British Kaffraria, destroying the power of the Xhosa chiefs. Following a severe lung sickness epidemic among their cattle in 1854–56, the Xhosa killed many of their remaining cattle and in 1857–58 grew few crops in response to a millenarian prophecy that this would cause their ancestors to rise from the dead and destroy the whites. Many thousands of Xhosa starved to death, and large numbers of survivors were driven into the Cape Colony to work. British Kaffraria fused with the Cape Colony in 1865, and thousands of Africans newly defined as Fingo resettled east of the Great Kei, thereby creating Fingoland. The Transkei, as this region came to be known, consisted of the hilly country between the Cape and Natal. It became a large African reserve and grew in size when those parts that were still independent were annexed in the 1880s and ’90s (Pondoland lost its independence in 1894).

European missionaries and their African catechists worked unremittingly from the 1820s to Christianize indigenous communities and to introduce them to European manufactured goods they had previously done well without. Whatever intentions the missionaries may have had, their efforts undermined African worldviews and contributed to the destruction of traditional African communities throughout South Africa. For a time nevertheless, a small number of African peasant farmers used plows, paid rents and taxes, produced for the market, and sold surplus grain to the towns in competition with colonial farmers. The difficulty they encountered obtaining capital, however, as well as the legal and political discrimination they faced, drove most of them out of business in the decades following the South African War of 1899–1902.

The Cape economy, narrowly based on wine and wool, was not particularly prosperous. Wool exports, though soaring to some 6,000 tons in 1855, lagged far behind those of Australia and remained susceptible to drought and market slumps. African labour built roads, but only a few miles of railway were constructed before 1870. Various alternatives that would broaden the economic base were explored. Accumulations of guano (droppings of gannets and cormorants used as fertilizer) were exploited on off-coast islands; copper mining began in the southwestern party of the country; hunters operating as far north as the Zambezi sent back large quantities of ivory; and traders, hunters, missionaries, and full-time prospectors surveyed and sampled the rocks. The most potentially rewarding commodities were diamonds discovered in the Vaal valley and gold found in the Tati valley and in the northern and eastern Transvaal between 1866 and 1871.

Disputes in the north and east

To the north, colonial communities and African states alternately cooperated and competed with each other, with the advantage slowly moving to the colonists. The Swazi and Gaza supplied slaves both to the Transvaal Boers and to the Portuguese. During the 1850s the Swazi overran much of the Lowveld, where they absorbed many groups and exchanged captured children for firearms and horses with the Transvaal settlers. After the death of Soshangane (leader of the Gaza state) in 1856, a Gaza civil war broke out that also involved the Swazi, Boers, and Portuguese. After the Swazi gained control of land almost to Maputo in 1864, the Gaza (under the victorious Mzila) migrated northward into the Buzi River area of present-day eastern Zimbabwe.

Farther south the Zulu competed with the Swazi and the Boers to dominate the Pongolo and Ngwavuma valleys and with the Boers to control the Buffalo (Mziniathi) River area. The colonial administrator, Theophilus Shepstone, interfered not only in Zulu politics but also in Ndebele succession dispute (1869–72), attempting to oust the eventual leader (Lobengula) in favour of a pretender. Marthinus Pretorius, the Transvaal leader, annexed huge areas, at least on paper. To the irritation of settler farmers and plantation owners, few Zulu went south to work in Natal. Instead, a supply of Mozambican indentured labourers (some of them forced) entered the region. This eventually evolved into a steady flow of migrant workers in the following decades, but, because not enough labour appeared initially in the early 1860s, indentured labourers from India were brought in to work on the new sugar plantations.

The Sotho continued their tenacious hold on their lands along the Caledon River and for a time supplied the Boers of the Orange Free State with grain and cattle. The Sotho mobilized a force of 10,000 and defeated the Boers in 1858. The Boers, however, coveted the fertile Caledon valley and defeated the Sotho eight years later after the Boers regained their unity. The Sotho were forced to sign the Treaty of Thaba Bosiu (1866), and only British annexation of Sotho territory in 1868 prevented their complete collapse.

The Zulu after Shaka

The Zulu, although initially successful at repelling the Europeans, were, like the Ndebele, eventually overpowered by them in clashes such as the Battle of Blood (Ncome) River in 1838. Boer attacks on the Zulu between 1838 and 1839 precipitated a Zulu civil war between Dingane and Mpande. The latter allied himself with the Boer invaders and so split the kingdom. Between 1839 and 1840 the Boers seized large parts of the Zulu kingdom, including the area between the Tugela and the Swart-Mfolozi. When the British in turn evicted the Boers and annexed Natal in 1843, the southern region to the Tugela was restored to the Zulu. Mpande (reigned 1840–72), a formidable ruler, controlled territory between the Tugela in the south and, roughly, the Pongolo in the north, boundaries that were not seriously disturbed until 1879.

In 1856 the primary conflict in the Zulu civil war (the Battle of Ndondakasuka on the lower Tugela River, close to the sea) elevated Mpande’s younger son, Cetshwayo, over Mpande’s older son, Mbuyazi. Although Cetshwayo formally became ruler of Zululand only upon his father’s death in 1872, he had in fact effectively ruled the kingdom since the early 1860s.

By the late 1870s, colonial officials had identified the Zulu kingdom as a major obstacle to confederation, and in January 1879 British and colonial troops invaded Zululand (see Zulu War). During his rule Mpande had expanded Zulu military capacity, and Cetshwayo used this effectively against the British invaders at Isandhlwana in 1879. The annihilation of a large British force at Isandhlwana slowed the invasion, but imperial firepower ultimately prevailed (see Battles of Isandhlwana and Rorke’s Drift). For the Zulu, political dismemberment followed military defeat. British divide-and-rule policies precipitated another civil war in 1883, and Zululand was annexed in 1887.

The decline of the African states

As the 1860s came to an end, the great African states began to weaken. Not only did many important African leaders die during this period (Soshangane in 1858, Sekwati of the Pedi in 1861, Mswati in 1865, Mzilikazi in 1868, Moshoeshoe in 1870, and Mpande in 1872), but, increasingly, Europeans were determined to exploit Africans as a source of labour and to acquire the last large fertile areas controlled by them.

Colonial troops tipped the balance decisively against societies that had previously withstood attempts to bring them under the settlers’ control. A century of military conflict on the Cape frontier ended with the Cape-Xhosa war of 1877–78 (see Cape Frontier Wars). Between 1878 and 1881 the Cape Colony defeated rebellions in Griqualand West, the Transkei, and Basutoland. Sir Bartle Frere, governor of the Cape and high commissioner for southern Africa from March 1877, rapidly decided that independent African kingdoms had to be tamed in order to facilitate political and economic integration of the region.

Governor George Grey had already proposed a federated South Africa in 1858, and in the late 1860s the discovery of gold and diamonds reactivated this idea. The annexation of Basutoland in 1868 began a series of movements toward consolidation that included the British seizure of the diamond fields from the competing Griqua, Tlhaping, and Boers in 1871 (the Keate Award), Colonial Secretary Lord Carnarvon’s more determined federation plan of 1875, Shepstone’s invasion of the Transvaal in 1877, and the British invasions of Zululand and Pediland in 1879. British troops also took part in an 1879 campaign that crushed Pedi military power in the northern Transvaal. With the collapse of Zulu resistance in the 1880s, the invasions of the Gaza and Ndebele kingdoms in 1893–96, and the crushing of Venda resistance in 1898, by 1900 no autonomous African societies remained in the region.

Diamonds, gold, and imperialist intervention (1870–1902)

South Africa experienced a transformation between 1870, when the diamond rush to Kimberley began, and 1902, when the South African War ended. Midway between these dates, in 1886, the world’s largest goldfields were discovered on the Witwatersrand. As the predominantly agrarian societies of European South Africa began to urbanize and industrialize, the region evolved into a major supplier of precious minerals to the world economy; gold especially was urgently needed to back national currencies and ensure the continued flow of expanding international trade. British colonies, Boer republics, and African kingdoms all came under British control. These dramatic changes were propelled by two linked forces: the development of a capitalist mining industry and a sequence of imperialist interventions by Britain.

Diamonds and confederation

A chance find in 1867 had drawn several thousand fortune seekers to alluvial diamond diggings along the Orange, Vaal, and Harts rivers. Richer finds in “dry diggings” in 1870 led to a large-scale rush. By the end of 1871 nearly 50,000 people lived in a sprawling polyglot mining camp that was later named Kimberley.

Initially, individual diggers, black and white, worked small claims by hand. As production rapidly centralized and mechanized, however, ownership and labour patterns were divided more starkly along racial lines. A new class of mining capitalists oversaw the transition from diamond digging to mining industry as joint-stock companies bought out diggers. The industry became a monopoly by 1889 when De Beers Consolidated Mines (controlled by Cecil Rhodes) became the sole producer. Although some white diggers continued to work as overseers or skilled labourers, from the mid-1880s the workforce consisted mainly of black migrant workers housed in closed compounds by the companies (a method that had previously been used in Brazil).

The diamond zone was simultaneously claimed by the Orange Free State, the South African Republic, the western Griqua under Nicolaas Waterboer, and southern Tswana chiefs. At a special hearing in October 1871, Robert W. Keate (then lieutenant governor of Natal) found in favour of Waterboer, but the British persuaded him to request protection against his Boer rivals, and the area was annexed as Griqualand West.

The annexation of the diamond fields signaled a more progressive British policy under a Liberal ministry but fell short of the ambitious confederation policy pursued by Lord Carnarvon, the colonial secretary in Benjamin Disraeli’s 1874 Conservative government; he sought to unite the republics and colonies into a self-governing federation in the British Empire, a concept inspired by Theophilus Shepstone, who, as secretary for native affairs in Natal, urged a coherent regional policy with regard to African labour and administration.

Carnarvon concentrated at first on persuading the Cape and the Free State to accept federation, but a conference in London in August 1876 revealed how unreceptive these parties were to the proposal. With his southern gambit frustrated, Carnarvon embarked on a northern strategy. The South African Republic (Transvaal), virtually bankrupt, had suffered military humiliation at the hands of the Pedi, and support for President Thomas F. Burgers had declined because of this. Carnarvon commissioned Shepstone to annex the Transvaal, and, after encountering only token resistance at the beginning of 1877, he proclaimed it a British colony a few months later.

The new possession proved difficult to administer as empty coffers and insensitivity to Afrikaner resentments led to a clash over tax payments, and, under a triumvirate of Paul Kruger, Piet Joubert, and Marthinus Wessel Pretorius, the Transvaal Boers opted to fight for independence. British defeats, especially at Majuba in 1881, ended British insistence on the concept of confederation. By the London Convention of 1884, republican self-government was restored, subject to an imprecise British “suzerainty” over external relations.

Afrikaner and African politics in the Cape

The white population in the Cape numbered 240,000 by the mid-1870s and constituted about one-third of the colony’s population. Cape revenues accounted for three-fourths of the total income in the region’s four settler states in 1870, as the diamond discoveries created more revenue that could be used to build railways and public works. Although by this time some two-thirds of the settler population spoke Dutch or Afrikaans, political power rested largely with an English-speaking elite of merchants, lawyers, and landholders.

The conflict between Afrikaners and English speakers led to the establishment of the Afrikaner Bond in 1879. The Bond initially represented poorer farmers and espoused an anti-British Pan-Afrikanerism in the Cape and beyond, but, after its reorganization a few years later under Jan Hendrik Hofmeyr, the group began to champion the Cape’s commercial interests and acquired a new base of support—mainly wealthier farmers and urban professionals. When Hofmeyr threw his support behind Cecil Rhodes in 1890, he enabled Rhodes to become prime minister of the Cape; their alliance stemmed from a mutual desire for northward economic expansion. A major cleavage, however, opened up between Bond politicians and the English-speaking voters loosely defined as Cape liberals. The latter, particularly those in constituencies in the eastern Cape that had a significant percentage of black male voters, were tactically friendly to the small enfranchised stratum of fairly prosperous black peasants, whereas the Bond and most English-speaking white voters were hostile toward the black farmers growing cash crops and pursued more-restrictive franchise qualifications.

The number of blacks in the colony greatly increased between 1872 and 1894 as heretofore independent territories were annexed to the Cape. As black farmers became more prosperous and as more blacks became literate clerks and teachers, many individuals qualified to vote. The rise of the Afrikaner Bond and new laws affecting franchise qualifications and taxes also stimulated more-vigorous black participation in electoral politics after 1884. New political and educational bodies came into existence in the eastern Cape, as did the first black newspapers and black-controlled churches. The period also witnessed the first political organizations among Coloureds in the Cape and Indians in Natal and the Transvaal.

Gold mining

Prospectors established in 1886 the existence of a belt of gold-bearing reefs 40 miles (60 km) wide centred on present-day Johannesburg. The rapid growth of the gold-mining industry intensified processes started by the diamond boom: immigration, urbanization, capital investment, and labour migrancy. By 1899 the gold industry attracted investment worth £75 million, produced almost three-tenths of the world’s gold, and employed more than 100,000 people (the overwhelming majority of them black migrant workers).

The world’s richest goldfield was also the most difficult to work. Although the gold ore was abundant, the layers of it ran extremely deep, and the ore contained little gold. To be profitable, gold mining had to be intensive and deep-level, requiring large inputs of capital and technology. A group system, whereby more than 100 companies had been arranged into nine holding companies, or “groups,” facilitated collusion between companies to reduce competition over labour and keep costs down. The gold mines rapidly established a pattern of labour recruitment, remuneration, and accommodation that left its stamp on subsequent social and economic relations in the country. White immigrant miners, because of their skills, scarcity, and political power, won relatively high wages. In contrast, the more numerous unskilled black migrants from throughout Southern Africa, especially from present-day Mozambique, earned low pay (at century’s end about one-ninth the wage of white miners). Migrant miners were housed in compounds, which facilitated their control and reduced overhead costs.

The road to war

Even before the discovery of gold, the South African interior was an arena of tension and competition. Germany annexed South West Africa in 1884. The Transvaal claimed territory to its west; Britain countered by designating the territory the Bechuanaland protectorate and then annexed it as the crown colony of British Bechuanaland. Rhodes secured concessionary rights to land north of the Limpopo River, founded the British South Africa Company, and in 1890 dispatched a pioneer column to occupy what became known as Rhodesia.

While these forces jostled for position in the region at large, the domestic politics of the Transvaal became unsettled. Paul Kruger’s government made strenuous efforts to accommodate the mining industry, but it was soon at loggerheads with Britain, the mine magnates, and the British and other non-Afrikaner Uitlander (“Outlander”) immigrants. British policy makers expressed concern about the Transvaal’s potential as an independent actor, and deep-level-mine owners chafed at mine bosses’ corruption and inefficiency. The grievances of the Uitlanders, largely excluded from the vote, provided both cause and cover for a conspiracy between British officials and mining capitalists. An Uitlander uprising in Johannesburg was to be supported by an armed invasion from Bechuanaland, headed by Leander Starr Jameson, Rhodes’s lieutenant, who would intervene to “restore order.”

The plot was botched. The Uitlander rising did not take place, but Jameson went ahead with his incursion in December 1895, and within days he and his force had been rounded up. While Rhodes had to resign as prime minister of the Cape, British Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain managed to conceal his complicity. The Jameson Raid polarized Anglo-Boer sentiment in South Africa, simultaneously exacerbating republican suspicions, Uitlander agitation, and imperial anxieties.

In February 1898 Kruger was elected to a fourth term as president of the Transvaal. He entered a series of negotiations with Sir Alfred Milner (who became high commissioner and governor of the Cape in 1897) over the issue of the Uitlander franchise. Milner declared in private early in 1898 that “war has got to come” and adopted intransigent positions. The Cape government, headed by William P. Schreiner, attempted to mediate, as did Marthinus Steyn, the president of Free State, even while he attached his cause to Kruger’s. In September 1899 the two Boer republics gave an ultimatum to Britain, and, when it expired on October 11, Boer forces invaded Natal.

The South African War (1899–1902)

While the government of Lord Salisbury in Britain went to war to secure its hegemony in Southern Africa, the Boer republics did so to preserve their independence. The expensive and brutal colonial war lasted two and a half years and pitted almost 500,000 imperial troops against 87,000 republican burghers, Cape “rebels,” and foreign volunteers. The numerical weakness of the Boers was offset by their familiarity with the terrain, support from the Afrikaner populace, and the poor leadership and dated tactics of the British command. Although often styled a “white man’s war,” both sides used blacks extensively as labour, and at least 10,000 blacks fought for the British.

In the first phase of the war, Boer armies took the offensive and punished British forces at Colenso, Stormberg, and Magersfontein in December 1899 (“Black Week”). During 1900 Britain rushed reinforcements to the front, relieved sieges at Ladysmith, Kimberley, and Mafeking, and took Bloemfontein, Johannesburg, and Pretoria. In the third phase, Boer commandos avoided conventional engagements in favour of guerrilla warfare. The British commander, Lord Kitchener, devised a scorched-earth policy against the commandos and the rural population supporting them, in which he destroyed arms, blockaded the countryside, and placed the civilian population in concentration camps. Some 25,000 Afrikaner women and children died of disease and malnutrition in these camps, while 14,000 blacks died in separate camps. In Britain the Liberal opposition vehemently objected to the government’s methods for winning the war.

Boer forces, which at the end consisted of about 20,000 exhausted and demoralized troops, sued for peace in May 1902. The Treaty of Vereeniging reflected the conclusive military victory of British power but made a crucial concession. It promised that the “question of granting the franchise to natives [blacks]” would be addressed only after self-government had been restored to the former Boer republics. The treaty thus allowed the white minority to decide the political fate of the black majority.

Reconstruction, union, and segregation (1902–29)

The Union of South Africa was born on May 31, 1910, created by a constitutional convention (in Durban in 1908) and an act of the British Parliament (1909). The infant state owed its conception to centralizing and modernizing forces generated by mineral discoveries, and its character was shaped by eight years of “reconstruction” between 1902 and 1910. During that period, efficient administrative structures were created, and a relationship developed between Afrikaner politicians and mining capitalists that consolidated the economic dominance of gold. Reconstruction also ensured that settler minorities would prevail over the black majority. Black societies were policed and taxed more effectively, and the new constitution excluded blacks from political power. Racial segregation was further developed through policies proposed during reconstruction and solidified after 1910.

Both Afrikaner and black nationalism utilized new political vehicles. Syndicalist white workers and Afrikaner republican diehards fought against employers and government, their clashes culminating in the Rand Revolt of 1922. Black protests against the new order ranged from genteel lobbying and passive resistance to armed rural revolt, strikes, and mass mobilization.

Milner and reconstruction

High Commissioner Milner transferred his headquarters from Cape Town to Pretoria in 1902. The move symbolized the centrality of the Transvaal to his mission of constructing a new order in South Africa. When Milner departed in 1905, his vision of a country politically dominated by English-speaking whites had failed. Schemes to flood the rural Transvaal with British settlers yielded only a trickle, and, worse yet, compulsory Anglicization of education only intensified feelings of Afrikaner nationalism. Opposition to “Milnerism” defined the emergent political groups led by former Boer generals Louis Botha, Jan Smuts, and J.B.M. (Barry) Hertzog. Milner had hoped to withhold self-rule from whites in South Africa until “there are three men of British race to two of Dutch.” But, when Henry Campbell-Bannerman’s Liberal ministry granted responsible government to the former republics in 1907, Afrikaner parties won elections in the Transvaal.

Yet, if Milner’s political design failed to take shape, he did largely realize his blueprint for economic and social engineering. Served by a group of handpicked young administrators, he made economic recovery a priority because it was imperative to restore the mines to profitability. He lowered rail rates and tariffs on imports and abolished the expensive concessions granted by the Kruger regime. Milner also made strenuous efforts to ensure cheap labour to the mines. To achieve this goal, he authorized the importation of some 60,000 Chinese indentured labourers when black migrants resisted wage cuts. Chinese miners, who would mostly return home by 1910, performed only certain tasks, but their employment set a precedent for a statutory colour bar in the gold mines. Although this experiment provoked political outcries in the Transvaal and in Britain, it succeeded in undercutting the bargaining power of black workers. The value of gold production swelled from £16 million in 1904 to £27 million by 1907.

The administration worked to remodel the Transvaal as a stable base for agricultural, industrial, and finance capital, spending some £16 million to return Afrikaners to their farms and equip them. It established a land bank, promoted scientific farming methods, and developed more-efficient tax-collection methods, which increased pressures on black peasants to work for white farmers. Especially on the Witwatersrand, the young administrators tackled town planning, public transport, housing, and sanitation, and in each of these spheres a new urban geography proceeded from the principle of separating white and black workers.

The South African Native Affairs Commission (SANAC) was appointed to provide comprehensive answers to “the native question.” Its report (1905) proposed territorial separation of black and white landownership, systematic urban segregation by the creation of black “locations,” the removal of black “squatters” from white farms and their replacement by wage labourers, and the segregation of blacks from whites in the political sphere. These (and other SANAC recommendations) provided the basis for laws passed between 1910 and 1936.

Convention and union

Concern in London over the electoral victory by the Afrikaner party Het Volk evaporated as soon as it became clear that both Botha and Smuts understood the economic preeminence of mining capital. A policy of reconciliation between Afrikaans- and English-speaking whites was also promoted.

A national convention, which met in Durban in 1908–09, drafted a constitution. Afrikaner leaders and Cape Premier John X. Merriman opted for a unitary state with Dutch and English as official languages and with parliamentary sovereignty. Executive authority was vested in a governor-general who would be advised by a cabinet from the governing party. Two “entrenched” clauses, on language and franchise, could be amended only by a two-thirds majority vote in Parliament. While Cape delegates favoured a colour-blind franchise, those from the Transvaal and Orange Free State demanded an exclusively white electorate. A compromise simply confirmed existing electoral arrangements. The former republics retained white male adult suffrage and did not consider female suffrage (white women finally won the right to vote in 1930). In 1910, 85 percent of Cape voters were white, 10 percent Coloured, and 5 percent black. Representation was further limited on racial lines: even in the Cape, only whites could stand for Parliament.

Black, Coloured, and Indian political responses

The South African War occurred at a time when many black communities suffered under great hardship. During the 1890s, drought and cattle disease (particularly rinderpest) impoverished pastoralists, while competition increased for black land and labour. During the war, most black South Africans identified with the British cause because imperial politicians assured them that “equal laws, equal liberty” for all races would prevail after a Boer defeat.

However, the Treaty of Vereeniging (see Vereeniging, Peace of ) withdrew such promises, and a sense of betrayal stimulated political protest, especially among mission-educated blacks. Various organizations arose to counter the impending union of white-ruled provinces by ethnically and regionally uniting blacks. In response to the constitutional convention, blacks held their own (the South African Native Convention) in Bloemfontein. This provided an important step toward the formation of a permanent national black political organization. Such an organization was finally founded on Jan. 8, 1912, when the South African Native National Congress (from 1923 the African National Congress; ANC) came into existence. Not all black protest occurred through the new middle-class organizations, however. Some black farmers from Natal refused to pay a poll tax in 1906, and their resistance developed into an armed rising led by Bambatha, a Zulu chief. At the end of this “reluctant rebellion,” between 3,000 and 4,000 blacks had been killed and many thousands imprisoned.

Parallel developments took place among politically conscious Coloureds and Indians. Their first nationally based organization was the African Political (later People’s) Organization, founded in Cape Town in 1902. Under the presidency of Abdullah Abdurahman, this body lobbied for Coloured rights and had links at times with other black political groups. Indians in the Transvaal, led by Mohandas K. Gandhi, also resisted discriminatory legislation. Gandhi spent the years 1893 to 1914 in South Africa as a legal agent for Indian merchants in Natal and the Transvaal. Between 1906 and 1909, in protest against a Transvaal registration law requiring Indians to carry passes, Gandhi first implemented the methods of satyagraha (nonviolent noncompliance), which he later used with great effect in India.

Union and disunity

Supported by the majority party in each province and by the British government, Louis Botha formed the first union government in May 1910. The Botha administration entered a period of continuous change and violent conflict as tensions arose from issues left unresolved by the constitution, from rapid but uneven economic growth, and from the legacy of conquest and dispossession of the indigenous peoples.

One source of conflict was the relationship between employers and organized white workers. The Chamber of Mines and miners’ trade unions on the Witwatersrand engaged in combat for a decade and a half. Whenever violent confrontations flared up—as they did in 1907, 1913, and 1914—the government deployed troops to end the strikes. White workers suspended strike action during World War I, but militancy returned in 1919, this time fueled by inflation. The Chamber of Mines announced in December 1921 that, because of rising costs and a falling gold price, it planned on replacing semiskilled white workers with lower-paid blacks. A miners’ protest stoppage in January 1922 became a general strike, and in March it developed into an armed rising, with strikers organized as commandos. Jan Smuts, prime minister since Botha’s death in 1919, used artillery and aircraft to crush what became known as the Rand Revolt, at a cost of some 200 lives. This intense conflict between white unions and employers ended with the passage of the Industrial Conciliation Act in 1924, which set up new state structures for regulating industrial conflicts.

Black workers also engaged in sporadic strikes before, during, and after World War I, giving rise to the first black trade unions. More than 70,000 African gold miners halted production for a week when they struck for higher wages in February 1920. Soldiers and police broke the strike, but not before 11 miners died and more than 100 were injured. This strike was part of a wave of protest in several cities as inflation eroded the real wages of black workers.

Afrikaner rebellion and nationalism

When Britain declared war on Germany in 1914, South Africa’s dominion status meant that it was automatically at war, and its troops mobilized to invade German South West Africa. This sparked a rebellion led by former Boer generals, who held high-ranking positions as officers in the Union Defence Force. Some 10,000 soldiers, mainly poverty-stricken rural Afrikaners, joined the rising. The government used 32,000 troops to suppress it, and more than 300 men lost their lives in the fighting.

The rebellion, though, was an atypical episode in the rise of Afrikaner nationalism as a political force. More-telling responses came from those Afrikaners who had been profoundly affected by economic change, war, and reconstruction. After 1902, thousands of landless families streamed into the cities, indicating the extent to which the prewar rural social order had crumbled. One response to the threat of further disintegration was a “second language movement” spearheaded by teachers, clergymen, journalists, and lawyers who felt deeply threatened by the cultural dominance of English speakers. It succeeded in its immediate aim when Afrikaans replaced Dutch as an official language in 1925.

J.B.M. Hertzog founded the National Party in 1914, with support mainly from “poor whites” and militant intellectuals. The general election of 1915 gave the National Party 30 percent of the vote, with Afrikaners deserting the South African Party led by Botha and Smuts. Hertzog’s party won a majority of both seats and votes in 1920 on a platform of republicanism and separate school systems for Afrikaans- and English-speaking whites. The June 1924 election propelled Hertzog to the position of prime minister through a coalition between the National and Labour parties known as the Pact government.

Segregation

In the first two decades of the union, segregation became a distinctive feature of South African political, social, and economic life as whites addressed the “native question.” Blacks were “retribalized” and their ethnic differences highlighted. New statutes provided for racial separation in industrial, territorial, administrative, and residential spheres. This barrage of legislation was partly the product of reactionary attitudes inherited from the past and partly an effort to regulate class and race relations during a period of rapid industrialization when the black population was growing steadily.

The 1911 Mines and Works Act and its 1926 successor reserved certain jobs in mining and the railways for white workers. The Natives’ Land Act of 1913 defined less than one-tenth of South Africa as black “reserves” and prohibited any purchase or lease of land by blacks outside the reserves. The law also restricted the terms of tenure under which blacks could live on white-owned farms. The Native (Urban Areas) Act of 1923 segregated urban residential space and created “influx controls” to reduce access to cities by blacks. Hertzog proposed increasing the reserve areas and removing black voters in the Cape from the common roll in 1926, aims that were finally realized through the Representation of Natives Act (1936). Blacks now voted on a separate roll to elect three white representatives to the House of Assembly.

The Pact years (1924–33)

Hertzog’s Pact government strengthened South Africa’s autonomy, aided local capital, and protected white workers against black competition. Hertzog also played a leading role at the Imperial Conference in London that issued the Balfour Report (1926), establishing autonomy in foreign affairs for the dominions. When he returned from Britain, Hertzog turned his attention to creating the symbols of nationalism—flag and anthem. Economic nationalism included protective tariffs for local industry, subsidies to facilitate agricultural exports, and a state-run iron and steel industry. White trade unions grew more bureaucratic and less militant, although their members enjoyed at best modest material gains. Unskilled and nonunionized whites who received support through sheltered employment in the public sector and through prescribed minimum wages in the private sector gained more directly. Although the overall level of white poverty remained high, through these policies the manufacturing sector absorbed white labour nearly twice as fast as black.

Blacks gained little during this period and continued to lose earlier benefits. For them, segregation meant restricted mobility, diminished opportunities, more-stringent controls, and a general sense of exclusion. Economic conditions in the reserves continued to deteriorate; the terms of tenancy became more onerous on white-owned farms; and the urban slums provided a harsh alternative for those who left the land.

The first mass-based black political organization, the Industrial and Commercial Workers Union (ICU), flourished in response to deteriorating conditions. Until 1926 the ICU was a Cape-based organization with black and some Coloured members drawn mainly from urban areas. As a broadly based vehicle of rural protest, it had many thousands of supporters among black tenants on white farms. The ICU linked innumerable local rural grievances with a generalized call for land and liberation, but by 1929 its influence had declined. However, other organizations built on its base. The Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA), founded in 1921, was at first active almost solely within white trade unions, but from 1925 it recruited black members more energetically, and in 1928–29 it called for black majority rule and closer cooperation with the ANC. Its connection to the ANC occurred most prominently with Josiah Gumede (president 1927–30), whose political views moved leftward in the late 1920s. This led to a split in the ANC in 1930 as the more moderate members expelled the more radical ones.

The 1929 general election reflected the political challenges to white supremacy. For the first time since union, questions of “native policy” dominated white electoral politics. Afrikaner nationalists made “black peril” and “communist menace” their rallying cries. It was not to be the last such occasion.

The apartheid years

The intensification of apartheid in the 1930s

The Hertzog government achieved a major goal in 1931 when the British Parliament passed the Statute of Westminster, which removed the last vestiges of British legal authority over South Africa. Three years later the South African Parliament secured that decision by enacting the Status of the Union Act, which declared the country to be “a sovereign independent state.”

Although Hertzog’s National Party held a majority of the seats in the House of Assembly and dominated the South African cabinet in the early 1930s, its mismanagement of problems created by the Great Depression led him to form a coalition with his rival Smuts in 1933. Smuts was the leader of the South African Party, whose support came from the major industrialists and which was the party of most of the English-speaking whites (who made up less than half of the white population). In contrast, the National Party derived its main support from Afrikaner farmers and intellectuals. By 1934 the two organizations had merged to form the United Party, with Hertzog as prime minister and Smuts his deputy. The two parties and the two leaders had a common interest in favouring the enfranchised population, nearly all of whom were white, over the unenfranchised, all of whom were black. They agreed to provide massive support for white farmers, to assist poor whites by providing them with jobs protected from black competition, and to curb the movement of blacks from the reserves into the towns. Meanwhile, National Party member Daniel F. Malan disagreed with the merger of the parties and chose to keep the National Party functioning.

The earnings from South Africa’s gold exports increased sharply after Britain and the United States abandoned the gold standard in the early 1930s. White farmers prospered; new secondary industries were established; and South Africans of all races continued to flock to the towns. South Africa changed from a predominantly rural country that exported raw materials and imported manufactured consumer goods into a country with a diverse economy. Although the standard of living for most whites improved greatly from this expansion, the lives of Coloureds, blacks, and Indians were hardly affected. The government did add some land to the reserves in 1936, but it never exceeded 13 percent of the area of the country. Until the end of apartheid, almost nine-tenths of South Africa—including the best land for agriculture and the bulk of the mineral deposits—belonged exclusively to whites. Unsurprisingly, conditions on the native reserves became progressively worse through overpopulation and soil erosion. The government attempted to resolve these problems through a series of programs called Betterment Schemes, which involved keeping tight control over land use in the reserves, often drastically culling cattle, and enforcing the building of contour ridges to reduce soil erosion. Overcrowding in the reserves made it necessary for a high proportion of the men to work for wages elsewhere—on white farms or in the towns, where they lived in a hostile world. Black and Coloured farm labourers, scattered in small groups throughout the agricultural areas, were isolated, and in the towns life was insecure and wages low. In the gold-mining industry the real wages of blacks declined by about one-seventh between 1911 and 1941; white miners received 12 times the salary of blacks.

Education for blacks was left largely to Christian missions, whose resources, even when augmented by small government grants, enabled them to enroll only a small proportion of the black population. Missionaries did, however, run numerous schools, including some excellent high schools that took a few pupils through to the university level; and missionaries were the dominant influence at the South African Native College at Fort Hare (founded 1916), which included degree courses. These institutions educated a small but increasing number of blacks, who secured teaching jobs and positions in the lower reaches of the civil service or functioned as clergy (especially in the independent churches that had broken away from mainstream white churches).

Educated blacks were frustrated by the fact that whites did not treat them as equals, and some of them took part in opposition politics in the ANC. However, the ANC and two parallel movements—the African Political Organization (a Coloured group) and the South African Indian Congress—had little popular support and exerted little influence during this period. Their leaders were mission-educated men who had liberal goals and used strictly constitutional methods, such as petitions to the authorities. The radical African ICU had collapsed by 1930, and the CPSA made little headway among blacks.

World War II

When Britain declared war on Germany on Sept. 3, 1939, the United Party split. Hertzog wanted South Africa to remain neutral, but Smuts opted for joining the British war effort. Smuts’s faction narrowly won the crucial parliamentary debate, and Hertzog and his followers left the party, many rejoining the National Party faction Malan had maintained since 1934. Smuts then became the prime minister, and South Africa declared war on Germany.

South Africa made significant contributions to the Allied war effort. Some 135,000 white South Africans fought in the East and North African and Italian campaigns, and 70,000 blacks and Coloureds served as labourers and transport drivers. South African platinum, uranium, and steel became valuable resources, and, during the period that the Mediterranean Sea was closed to the Allies, Durban and Cape Town provisioned a vast number of ships en route from Britain to the Suez.

The war proved to be an economic stimulant for South Africa, although wartime inflation and lagging wages contributed to social protests and strikes after the end of the war. Driven by reduced imports, the manufacturing and service industries expanded rapidly, and the flow of blacks to the towns became a flood. By the war’s end, more blacks than whites lived in the towns. They set up vast squatter camps on the outskirts of the cities and improvised shelters from whatever materials they could find. They also began to flex their political muscles. Blacks boycotted a Witwatersrand bus company that tried to raise fares, they formed trade unions, and in 1946 more than 60,000 black gold miners went on strike for higher wages and improved living conditions.

Although the 1946 strike was brutally suppressed by the government, white intellectuals did propose a series of reforms within the segregation framework. The government and private industry made a few concessions, such as easing the industrial colour bar, increasing black wages, and relaxing the pass laws, which restricted the right of blacks to live and work in white areas. The government, however, failed to discuss these problems with black representatives.

Afrikaners felt threatened by the concessions given to blacks and created a series of ethnic organizations to promote their interests, including an economic association, a federation of Afrikaans cultural associations, and the Afrikaner Broederbond, a secret society of Afrikaner cultural leaders. During the war many Afrikaners welcomed the early German victories, and some of them even committed acts of sabotage.

The United Party, which had won the general election in 1943 by a large majority, approached the 1948 election complacently. While the party appeared to take an ambiguous position on race relations, Malan’s National Party took an unequivocally pro-white stance. The National Party claimed that the government’s weakness threatened white supremacy and produced a statement that used the word apartheid to describe a program of tightened segregation and discrimination. With the support of a tiny fringe group, the National Party won the election by a narrow margin.

The National Party and apartheid

After its victory the National Party rapidly consolidated its control over the state and in subsequent years won a series of elections with increased majorities. Parliament removed Coloured voters from the common voters’ rolls in 1956. By 1969 the electorate was exclusively white: Indians never had any parliamentary representation, and the seats for white representatives of blacks and Coloureds had been abolished.

One plank of the National Party platform was for South Africa to become a republic, preferably outside the Commonwealth. The issue was presented to white voters in 1960 as a way to bring about white unity, especially because of concern with the problems that the Belgian Congo was then experiencing as it became independent. By a simple majority the voters approved the republic status. The government structure would change only slightly: the governor-general would be replaced by a state president, who would be chosen by Parliament. At a meeting in London in March 1961, South Africa had hoped to retain its Commonwealth status, but, when other members criticized it over its apartheid policies, it withdrew from the organization and on May 31, 1961, became the Republic of South Africa.

The government vigorously furthered its political goals by making it compulsory for white children to attend schools that were conducted in their home language, either Afrikaans or English (except for the few who went to private schools). It advanced Afrikaners to top positions in the civil service, army, and police and in such state corporations as the South African Broadcasting Corporation. It also awarded official contracts to Afrikaner banks and insurance companies. These methods raised the living standard of Afrikaners closer to that of English-speaking white South Africans.

Following a recession in the early 1960s, the economy grew rapidly until the late 1970s. By that time, owing to the efforts of public and private enterprise, South Africa had developed a modern infrastructure, by far the most advanced in Africa. It possessed efficient financial institutions, a national network of roads and railways, modernized port facilities in Cape Town and Durban, long-established mining operations producing a wealth of diamonds, gold, and coal, and a range of industries. De Beers Consolidated Mines and the Anglo American Corporation of South Africa, founded by Ernest Oppenheimer in 1917, dominated the private sector, forming the core of one of the world’s most powerful networks of mining, industrial, and financial companies and employing some 800,000 workers on six continents. State corporations (parastatals) controlled industries vital to national security. South African Coal, Oil, and Gas Corporation (SASOL) was established in 1950 to make South Africa self-sufficient in petroleum resources by converting coal to gasoline and diesel fuel. After the United Nations (UN) placed a ban on arms exports to South Africa in 1964, Armaments Corporation of South Africa (Armscor) was created to produce high-quality military equipment.

The man who played a major part in transforming apartheid from an election slogan into practice was Hendrik F. Verwoerd. Born in The Netherlands, Verwoerd immigrated with his parents to South Africa when he was a child. He became minister of native affairs in 1950 and was prime minister from 1958 until 1966, when Dimitri Tsafendas, a Coloured man, assassinated him in Parliament. (Tsafendas was judged to be insane and was confined to a mental institution after the murder.) Verwoerd’s successor, B.J. Vorster, had been minister of justice, police, and prisons, and he shared Verwoerd’s philosophy of white supremacy. In Verwoerd’s vision, South Africa’s population contained four distinct racial groups—white, black, Coloured, and Asian—each with an inherent culture. Because whites were the “civilized” group, they were entitled to control the state.

The all-white Parliament passed many laws to legalize and institutionalize the apartheid system. The Population Registration Act (1950) classified every South African by race. The Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act (1949) and the Immorality Act (1950) prohibited interracial marriage or sex. The Suppression of Communism Act (1950) defined communism and its aims broadly to include any opposition to the government and empowered the government to detain anyone it thought might further “communist” aims. The Indemnity Act (1961) made it legal for police officers to commit acts of violence, to torture, or to kill in the pursuit of official duties. Later laws gave the police the right to arrest and detain people without trial and to deny them access to their families or lawyers. Other laws and regulations collectively known as “petty apartheid” segregated South Africans in every sphere of life: in buses, taxis, and hearses, in cinemas, restaurants, and hotels, in trains and railway waiting rooms, and in access to beaches. When a court declared that separate amenities should be equal, Parliament passed a special law to override it.

“Grand apartheid,” in contrast, related to the physical separation of the racial groups in the cities and countryside. Under the Group Areas Act (1950) the cities and towns of South Africa were divided into segregated residential and business areas. Thousands of Coloureds, blacks, and Indians were removed from areas classified for white occupation.

Blacks were treated like “tribal” people and were required to live on reserves under hereditary chiefs except when they worked temporarily in white towns or on white farms. The government began to consolidate the scattered reserves into 8 (eventually 10) distinct territories, designating each of them as the “homeland,” or Bantustan, of a specific black ethnic community. The government manipulated homeland politics so that compliant chiefs controlled the administrations of most of those territories. Arguing that Bantustans matched the decolonization process then taking place in tropical Africa, the government devolved powers onto those administrations and eventually encouraged them to become “independent.” Between 1976 and 1981 four accepted independence—Transkei, Bophuthatswana, Venda, and Ciskei—though none was ever recognized by a foreign government. Like the other homelands, however, they were economic backwaters, dependent on subsidies from Pretoria.

Conditions in the homelands continued to deteriorate, partly because they had to accommodate vast numbers of people with minimal resources. Many people found their way to the towns; but the government, attempting to reverse this flood, strengthened the pass laws by making it illegal for blacks to be in a town for more than 72 hours at a time without a job in a white home or business. A particularly brutal series of forced removals were conducted from the 1960s to the early ’80s, in which more than 3.5 million blacks were taken from towns and white rural areas (including lands they had occupied for generations) and dumped into the reserves, sometimes in the middle of winter and without any facilities.

The government also established direct control over the education of blacks. The Bantu Education Act (1953) took black schools away from the missions, and more state-run schools—especially at the elementary level—were created to meet the expanding economy’s increasing demand for semiskilled black labour. The Extension of University Education Act (1959) prohibited the established universities from accepting black students, except with special permission. Instead, the government created new ethnic university colleges—one each for Coloureds, Indians, and Zulus and one for Sotho, Tswana, and Venda students, as well as a medical school for blacks. The South African Native College at Fort Hare, which missionaries had founded primarily but not exclusively for blacks, became a state college solely for Xhosa students. The government staffed these ethnic colleges with white supporters of the National Party and subjected the students to stringent controls.

Resistance to apartheid

Apartheid imposed heavy burdens on most South Africans. The economic gap between the wealthy few, nearly all of whom were white, and the poor masses, virtually all of whom were black, Coloured, or Indian, was larger than in any other country in the world. While whites generally lived well, Indians, Coloureds, and especially blacks suffered from widespread poverty, malnutrition, and disease. Most South Africans struggled daily for survival despite the growth of the national economy.

After the ANC Youth League emerged in the early 1940s, the ANC itself came to life again under a vigorous president, Albert Luthuli, and three younger men—Walter Sisulu, Oliver Tambo, and Nelson Mandela (the latter two briefly had a joint law practice in Johannesburg). The South African Indian Congress, which had also been revitalized, helped the ANC organize a defiance campaign in 1952, during which thousands of volunteers defied discriminatory laws by passively courting arrest and burning their pass books. A mass meeting held three years later, called Congress of the People, included Indians, Coloureds, and sympathetic whites. The Freedom Charter was adopted, asserting that “South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black or white, and no Government can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of the people.” The government broke up the meeting, subsequently arrested more than 150 people, and charged them with high treason. Although the trial did not result in any guilty verdicts, it dragged on until 1961. To prevent further gatherings, the government passed the Prohibition of Political Interference Act (1968), which banned the formation and foreign financing of nonracial political parties.

Robert Sobukwe, a language teacher at the University of the Witwatersrand, led a group of blacks who broke away from the ANC in 1959 and founded the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC) because they believed that the ANC’s alliance with white, Coloured, and Indian organizations had impeded the struggle for black liberation. The PAC launched a fresh antipass campaign in March 1960, and thousands of unarmed blacks invited arrest by presenting themselves at police stations without passes. At Sharpeville, a black township near Johannesburg, the police opened fire on the crowd outside a police station. At least 67 blacks were killed and more than 180 wounded, most of them shot in the back. Thousands of workers then went on strike, and in Cape Town some 30,000 blacks marched in a peaceful protest to the centre of the city. Rebellion in rural areas such as Pondoland also erupted at this time against the controls of homeland authorities. The government reestablished control by force by mobilizing the army, outlawing the ANC and the PAC, and arresting more than 11,000 people under emergency regulations.

After Sharpeville the ANC and PAC leaders and some of their white sympathizers came to the conclusion that apartheid could never be overcome by peaceful means alone. PAC established an armed wing called Poqo, and the ANC set up its military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (“Spear of the Nation”), in 1961. Although their military units detonated several bombs in government buildings during the next few years, the ANC and PAC did not pose a serious threat to the state, which had a virtual monopoly on modern weaponry. By 1964 the government had captured many of the leaders, including Mandela and Sobukwe, and they were sentenced to long terms at the prison on Robben Island in Table Bay, off Cape Town. Other perpetrators of acts of sabotage, including John Harris (who was white), were hanged. Hundreds of others fled the country, and Tambo presided over the ANC’s executive headquarters in Zambia.

The unraveling of apartheid

The government was successful at containing opposition for almost a decade, and foreign investment that had been briefly withdrawn in the early 1960s returned. Such conditions proved to be only temporary, however.

A new phase of resistance began in 1973 when black trade unions organized a series of strikes for higher wages and improved working conditions. Stephen Biko and other black students founded the Black Peoples Convention (BPC) in 1972 and inaugurated what was loosely termed the Black Consciousness movement, which appealed to blacks to take pride in their own culture and proved immensely attractive.

On June 16, 1976, thousands of children in Soweto, an African township outside Johannesburg, demonstrated against the government’s insistence that they be taught in Afrikaans rather than in English. When the police opened fire with tear gas and then bullets, the incident initiated a nationwide cycle of protest and repression. Using its usual tactics, the government banned many organizations such as the BPC, and within a year the police had killed more than 500, including Biko. These events focused worldwide attention on South Africa. The UN General Assembly had denounced apartheid in 1973; four years later the UN Security Council voted unanimously to impose a mandatory embargo on the export of arms to South Africa.

The illusion that apartheid would bring peace to South Africa had shattered by 1978. Most of the homelands proved to be economic and political disasters: labour was their only significant export, and most of their leadership was corrupt and unpopular. The national economy entered a period of recession, coupled with high inflation, and many skilled whites emigrated. South Africa, increasingly isolated as the last bastion of white racial domination on the continent, became the focus of global denunciation.

At that time the leadership of the National Party passed to a new class of urban Afrikaners—business leaders and intellectuals who, like their English-speaking white counterparts, believed that reforms should be introduced to appease foreign and domestic critics. Pieter W. Botha succeeded B.J. Vorster as prime minister in August 1978, and his government introduced some reforms, but it also increased state controls. It repealed the bans on interracial sex and marriage, desegregated many hotels, restaurants, trains, and buses, removed the reservation of skilled jobs for whites, and repealed the pass laws. Provided that black trade unions registered, they received access to a new industrial court, and they legally could strike. A new constitution was promulgated that created separate parliamentary bodies for Indians and for Coloureds, but it also vested great powers in an executive president, namely Botha.

The Botha reforms, however, stopped short of making any real change in the distribution of power. The white parliamentary chamber could override the Coloured and Indian chambers on matters of national significance, and all blacks remained disenfranchised. The Group Areas Act and the Land Acts maintained residential segregation. Schools and health and welfare services for blacks, Indians, and Coloureds remained segregated and inferior, and most nonwhites, especially blacks, were still desperately poor. Moreover, Botha used the State Security Council, which was dominated by military officers, rather than the cabinet as his major policy-making body, and he embarked on a massive military buildup. Military service for white males, already universal, increased from nine months to two years and included annual reserve duty.

South Africa’s black neighbours formed the Southern African Development Coordinating Conference in 1979 in an effort to limit South Africa’s economic domination of the region, but it made little progress. Most of the export trade from the region continued to pass through the country to South African ports, and South Africa provided employment for some 280,000 migrant workers from neighbouring countries. Botha also used South Africa’s military strength to restrain its neighbours from pursuing antiapartheid policies. The South African Defense Force (SADF) assisted the Renamo (Mozambique National Resistance) rebels in Mozambique and the UNITA (National Union for the Total Independence of Angola) faction in Angola’s civil war. SADF troops entered Botswana, Swaziland, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, and Mozambique in order to make preemptive attacks on ANC groups and their allies in these countries. Botha kept what was then called South West Africa/Namibia under South African domination in defiance of the UN, which had withdrawn the mandate it had granted to South Africa over the region. The country even produced a few nuclear weapons, the testing of which was detected in 1979. Increasingly, South African dissidents from all race groups were harassed, banned, or detained in prison without necessarily being charged under renewable 90-day detention sentences.

During the 1980s the conservative administrations of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in Britain and President Ronald Reagan in the United States faced increasingly insistent pressures for sanctions against South Africa. A high-level Commonwealth mission went to South Africa in 1986 in an unsuccessful effort to persuade the government to suspend its military actions in the townships, release political prisoners, and stop destabilizing neighbouring countries. Later that year American public resentment of South Africa’s racial policies was strong enough for the U.S. Congress to pass—over a presidential veto—the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act, which banned new investments and loans, ended air links, and prohibited the importation of many commodities. Other governments took similar actions.

The struggle intensified during the early 1980s and became further polarized. The new constitution of 1983 attempted to split the opposition to apartheid by meeting Indian and Coloured grievances while at the same time giving blacks no political rights except in the homelands. In response, more than 500 community groups formed the United Democratic Front, which became closely identified with the exiled ANC. Strikes, boycotts, and attacks on black police and urban councillors began escalating, and a state of emergency was declared in many parts of the country in 1985; a year later the government promulgated a nationwide state of emergency and embarked on a campaign to eliminate all opposition. For three years policemen and soldiers patrolled the black townships in armed vehicles. They destroyed black squatter camps and detained, abused, and killed thousands of blacks, while the army continued its forays into neighbouring countries. Rigid censorship laws tried to conceal those actions by banning television, radio, and newspaper coverage.

The brute force used by the government did not halt dissent. Long-standing critics such as Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, defied the government, and influential Afrikaner clerics and intellectuals withdrew their support. Resistance by black workers continued, including a massive strike by the National Union of Mineworkers, and saboteurs caused an increasing number of deaths and injuries. The economy suffered severe strain from the costs of sanctions, administering apartheid, and military adventurism, especially in Namibia and Angola. The gross domestic product decreased; annual inflation rose above 14 percent; and investment capital became scarce. Moreover, in 1988 the army suffered a military setback in Angola, after which the government signed an accord paving the way for the removal of Cuban troops that had been sent to Angola and for the UN-supervised independence of Namibia in 1990. Given these circumstances, many whites came to realize that there was no stopping the incorporation of blacks into the South African political system.

Government officials held several discussions with imprisoned ANC leader Mandela as these events unfolded, but Botha balked at the idea of allowing blacks to participate in the political system. National Party dissent against Botha in 1989 forced him to step down as both party leader and president. The National Party parliamentary caucus subsequently chose F.W. de Klerk, the party’s Transvaal provincial leader, as his successor. More than 20 years younger than Botha, de Klerk exhibited more sensitivity to the dynamics of a world where, as democracy arose in eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, the blatant racism that still existed in South Africa could no longer be tolerated. De Klerk announced a program of radical change in a dramatic address to Parliament on Feb. 2, 1990; nine days later Mandela was released from prison. During the next year Parliament repealed the basic apartheid laws, lifted the state of emergency, freed many political prisoners, and allowed exiles to return to South Africa.

Postapartheid South Africa

The Mandela presidency

Transition to majority rule

Mandela was elected president of the ANC in 1991, succeeding Tambo, who was in poor health and died two years later. Mandela and de Klerk, who both wanted to reach a peaceful solution to South Africa’s problems, met with representatives of most of the political organizations in the country, with a mandate to draw up a new constitution. These negotiations took place amid pervasive and escalating violence, especially in the southern Transvaal, the industrial heart of the country, and in Natal. Most of the conflicts in the Transvaal occurred between Zulu migrant workers, who were housed in large hostels, and the residents of the adjacent townships. The conflicts in Natal existed mainly between Zulu supporters of the ANC and members of the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), a Zulu movement led by Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi, who was chief minister of the KwaZulu homeland.

As the bargaining continued, both Mandela and de Klerk made concessions, with the result that both of them ran the risk of losing the support of their respective constituencies. While whites were loath to forfeit their power and privileges, blacks had hoped to win complete control of the state. A majority of white voters endorsed the negotiating process in a referendum in 1992, but both white and black extremists tried to sabotage the process through various acts of terror.

Mandela and de Klerk finally reached a peaceful agreement on the future of South Africa at the end of 1993, an achievement for which they jointly received the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize. In addition, leaders of 18 other parties endorsed an interim constitution, which was to take effect immediately after South Africa’s first election by universal suffrage, scheduled for April 1994. A parliament to be elected at that time would oversee the drafting of a permanent constitution for the country. The temporary constitution enfranchised all citizens 18 and older, abolished the homelands, and divided the country into nine new provinces, with provincial governments receiving substantial powers. It also contained a long list of political and social rights and a mechanism through which blacks could regain ownership of land that had been taken away under apartheid.

The ANC won almost two-thirds of the 1994 vote, the National Party slightly more than one-fifth, and the IFP most of the rest; all three received proportional cabinet representation. The ANC also became the majority party in seven of the provinces, but the IFP won a majority in KwaZulu-Natal, and the National Party—supported by mixed-race (people formerly classified as “Coloured” under apartheid) as well as white voters—won a majority in Western Cape. Mandela was sworn in as president of the new South Africa on May 10 before a vast jubilant crowd that included the secretary-general of the UN, 45 heads of state, and delegations from many other countries. Thabo Mbeki, a top official in the ANC, and de Klerk both became deputy presidents.

The new, multiparty “government of national unity” aimed to provide Africans with improved education, housing, electricity, running water, and sanitation. Recognizing that economic growth was essential for such purposes, the ANC adopted a moderate economic policy, dropping the socialist elements that had characterized its earlier programs. Mandela and his colleagues campaigned vigorously for foreign aid and investment, but capital investment entered the new South Africa slowly.

The government also had to grapple with a host of daunting institutional problems associated with the transition to a postapartheid society. Blacks joined the civil service; antiapartheid guerrillas became members of the police and the army; and new municipal governments that embraced both the old white cities and their black township satellites sprang into existence. Labour disputes, criminal violence, and conflict between Zulu factions, especially in KwaZulu-Natal, continued. The IFP (which supported a new provincial constitution that granted a sweeping autonomy to KwaZulu-Natal but was struck down by the Constitutional Court) refused to participate in the process that resulted in the creation of the new national constitution that Parliament passed in May 1996. Parliament revised the constitution in October after it was reviewed by the Constitutional Court; Mandela signed it into law in December of the same year. Also in 1996, the National Party left the government to form a “dynamic but responsible” opposition.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission

The most important domestic agency created during Mandela’s presidency was the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which was established to review atrocities committed during the apartheid years. It was set up in 1995 under the leadership of Archbishop Tutu and was given the power to grant amnesty to those found to have committed “gross violations of human rights” under extenuating circumstances. By the time the TRC delivered its five-volume report in 1999, more than 7,000 applications for amnesty had been reviewed; of those, about 150 had been granted. Applicants not given amnesty were subject to further legal proceedings.

The TRC was the target of widespread criticism: whites saw it as selectively targeting them, and blacks viewed its actions as a charade that allowed perpetrators of heinous crimes to go free. Former president P.W. Botha refused to answer a summons to give testimony to the commission and received a fine and a suspended sentence, although the sentence was later appealed and overturned. Nonetheless, the TRC uncovered information that otherwise would have remained hidden or taken longer to surface. For example, details of the murders of numerous ANC members were exposed, as were the operations of the State Counterinsurgency Unit at Vlakplaas; its commander, Colonel Eugene de Kock, was subsequently sentenced to a long prison term. The commission also investigated those opposed to apartheid. One of the most prominent was Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, the former wife of Nelson Mandela, who served briefly as a deputy minister in 1994–95. Her attempts to attain other offices ended when the TRC report indicated that she had been involved in apartheid-era violence. The report also allowed many to finally learn the fate of relatives or friends who had “disappeared” at the hands of the authorities.

South Africa since Mandela

Mbeki replaced Mandela as president of the ANC in December 1997 and became president of the country after the ANC’s triumphant win in the June 1999 elections. Mbeki pledged to address economic woes and the need to improve the social conditions in the country. The ANC was again victorious in the April 2004 elections, and Mbeki was elected to serve another term. South Africa had entered the 21st century with enormous problems to resolve, but the smooth transition of power in a government that represented a majority of the people—something unthinkable less than a decade earlier—provided hope that those problems could be addressed peaceably.

In March 2005 deputy president Jacob Zuma—who was widely held to be Mbeki’s successor as president of the ANC and, eventually, as president of the country—was dismissed by Mbeki amid charges of corruption; the next year Zuma stood trial for an unrelated charge of rape. He was acquitted of rape in May 2006, and the corruption charges were dropped later that year. Despite the repeated allegations of wrongdoing, which his supporters claimed were politically motivated, Zuma remained a popular figure within the ANC and was selected over Mbeki to be party president at the ANC conference in December 2007, in what was one of the most contentious leadership battles in the party’s history.

Following an allegation by a High Court judge that there had been political interference in Zuma’s prosecution on corruption charges, on Sept. 20, 2008, Mbeki was asked by the ANC to resign from the South African presidency, which he agreed to do once the relevant constitutional requirements had been fulfilled. On September 25 he was succeeded by Kgalema Motlanthe, who was selected by the National Assembly to serve as interim president until elections could be held in 2009.